Girl, 15, Could Get Life Term in Triple Slaying

The triple-murder trial of Kimberly Lane, a 15-year-old Lancaster girl, begins today, posing the following choice for the jurors:

* Prosecution: She was a callous schemer who manipulated two grown men into slaughtering the family that befriended them because she wanted to steal the family’s pickup truck. She kicked off the killings by luring a teenage boy to a bed, where a knife was pounded through his skull with a rock.

* Defense: She was a naive, loveless child duped into running away from home with a 48-year-old trailer park manager who promised to make her a Mafia princess in Chicago. Instead, he took her to a ratty, feces-littered camp in the Arizona desert where she was rescued from a rapist in a deadly brawl that threatens to destroy her life.

The jurors’ decision may be based largely on how they react when Lane tells her story in court, as her lawyer says she will.

Exposing Lane to cross-examination is risky, defense lawyer Larry Rosenthal said. “It’s very difficult, but she’s already testified in one hearing. She seemed to make a good impression, and she’ll do the best she can.”

If she loses that courtroom gamble, Lane--who is being tried as an adult--could be sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison.

Because she was only 14 when the killings occurred, she cannot be sentenced to death, but her co-defendants might be.

Frank Anderson, now 50, who ran a trailer park where Lane lived in Lancaster, and Bobby Poyson, 21, have already been convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and armed robbery. They are awaiting sentencing following a series of hearings to determine whether they should be imprisoned or executed.

While in custody last year, Lane gave birth to a girl she says she thinks was fathered by Anderson. Custody of the child was given to her mother and stepfather, who live in Chino Valley, Ariz.

Lane is on trial for the slayings of Roland Wear, 50; Wear’s girlfriend, Leta Kagen, 37; and Kagen’s 15-year-old son, Robert Delahunt. They lived in a shabby collection of rundown trailers in a desert area called Golden Valley.

The bloodshed there capped a series of events that began in Lancaster in the summer of 1996. Anderson and his wife moved into the trailer park where Lane lived with her younger brother and her father, an auto mechanic. Her father later described her to police in a missing-persons report as “a discipline problem.”

Lane and Anderson ran away together July 30, 1996. At a pretrial hearing, Mohave County Sheriff’s Det. Eric Cooper testified that according to Lane, Anderson convinced her to go to Kentucky to be married, and then to Chicago by telling her he was a member of the Mafia and she had been chosen to be [a Mafia] goddaughter.

Lane told the same story in a jailhouse interview seven months after the killings.

“He told me that I’d live in a big ol’ giant house,” she said. “And that I would have everything I needed.”

Couple Moved In With Family

The couple got as far as Laughlin, Nev., where they met Poyson, a drifter who several months earlier had moved in with Delahunt, Wear and Kagen, a woman with a reputation for taking in the unfortunate and homeless. Lane and Anderson moved in too.

Lane quickly grew disenchanted with the grim desert outpost, Cooper testified. The main trailer was littered with junk and cat feces and surrounded by wrecked cars and castoff tires. It lacked gas, electricity and running water.

But Wear had a 1993 Nissan pickup truck. Poyson and Anderson told investigators that Lane, pouting over the accommodations, suggested they “kill them and take the truck,” according to Mohave County Deputy Atty. Derek Carlisle, who is prosecuting Lane and Poyson.

A plot was hatched in which Lane would lure Delahunt into a kissing session in a travel trailer where he could be killed by the men, the prosecution contends.

Delahunt, a stocky boy with a shy grin and home-cut hair, walked five miles to the main highway each day to catch the bus to school. Classmates teased him about his shabby clothes and body odor. He escaped into drawing comic book characters, at which he displayed talent.

The lonely, tormented Delahunt was an easy sexual target for Lane, the prosecution contends. As they began necking on a bed in the trailer, Anderson burst in and slit the boy’s throat, the prosecution says.

Anderson’s attorney, Ken Everett, concedes Anderson did so, but argues that Lane cried out that she was being raped and Anderson came to her rescue. Deputy County Atty. Jace Zack, who prosecuted Anderson, said Anderson used a knife that had been planted in the room ahead of time.

According to statements by Anderson and Poyson and evidence introduced at their trial, the throat wound did not kill Delahunt. Poyson came in to finish him off, but “he just wouldn’t die,” Poyson told investigators.

Grisly Slayings Described in Court

For more than half an hour by Poyson’s estimate, they battered the boy with rocks and fists and smashed his head into the floor as he asked, “Why are you doing this to me?” Finally, with Anderson holding him down, Poyson used a rock to hammer a knife into Delahunt’s ear and through his skull, according to testimony at their trials.

Two hours later, they burst in on Kagen and Wear in their bedroom, Anderson shining a lantern for the rifle-toting Poyson, the men confessed. Kagen died instantly from a bullet in the brain. Wear was shot in the face but struggled in a battle that raged through the trailer and outside, where Poyson hoisted a cinder block and crushed his skull, as the county medical examiner put it, “like an eggshell.”

Lane, Poyson and Anderson loaded Wear’s pickup truck with a stereo, tools and a lantern and fled. At some point, Lane left Anderson to go off with Poyson.

Anderson was caught in a routine traffic stop in Anna, Ill., driving the truck, which had been reported stolen when the bodies were found. Poyson and Lane were captured at a homeless shelter in Evanston, Ill., where they had registered as a married couple.

Although Poyson did most or all of the killing, Lane should be found guilty of murder because she was the “instigator,” Carlisle contends.

Lane maintains that the portrait of her as a ruthless schemer was invented by the two men to help shift blame from themselves. It was Poyson and Anderson who suggested the killings, she said in the earlier interview. “I thought they were kidding,” Lane said.

“It really does hurt me to hear what people say about me. I am not some mass murderer, and I don’t, I don’t go off and I don’t hurt people.”

Lane’s mother, Amy Thompson, said that Anderson took advantage of her daughter’s lack of love at home. “She wanted to be loved,” Thompson said. “She wanted love she couldn’t get from her dad, and this 48-year-old man took advantage of that.”

Thompson’s husband, Tom, said: “These men were the influence on the girl--not this little girl dragging two men across the country to commit some atrocity. She’s fighting for her life, and she’s just as much a victim as those people who died.”